The present invention relates to a network-attached disk unit, and especially to a disk unit and related server unit that enable data protection when a function is offloaded to said disk drive and then executed.
Due to the improvements in technology which have resulted in a higher integration of an LSI, a disk unit can also be provided with a higher performance processor and higher functional control LSI ICs than before. Thus, a network-attached disk unit is proposed to raise the throughput of the total system by providing a disk unit with a network I/F so that direct access is possible not only from the server, but also from the client.
NASD (Network-Attached Secure Disks) have been proposed by Garth A. Gibson, et al, of CMU (Carnegie Mellon University). The details are described in the “File Server Scaling with Network-Attached Secure Disks” of the ACM International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (Sigmetrics '97), Seattle, Wash., Jun. 15-18, 1997. Further, an intelligent disk unit that increases system throughput by reducing the load of a server by offloading the processing being performed by a server to a disk unit has been proposed. That is, active disks have been proposed by Erik Riedel, Garth Gibson, et al, of CMU.
Details of active disks are described in the conference paper “Active Storage For Large-Scale Data Mining and Multimedia,” in the Proc. of the 24th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB '98), New York, N.Y., Aug. 24-27, 1998.